On the Mark: 2/22/2002

	Friday, February 22, 2002

Category-Specific Stories: I got this working to my satisfaction this afternoon. I now have Radio support for stories that are specific to a category website, differentiated from those on my community website. I documented the whole process just in case anybody else wants to try something similar. You may find ways to improve this facility. Please let me know if you do.
4:27:50 PM [Macro error: The file "D:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\www\#prefs.txt" wasn't found.]

Yikes! My Site Went Dark for a few minutes this afternoon. I was moving stuff around, setting up category-specific stories, when I lost everything on the community server. I did not fiddle with #upstream.xml so I am unsure why this happened. I tried the Radio/Publish/Entire site menu item and that seemed to fix everything. It took a few minutes to rerender everything, but it is all back there again.

I suspect that moving folders around caused a problem because Radio relies heavily on a structure, user.radio.settings.files, to keep track of all publishing related files. I put this out of whack by moving folders around. Still not sure why this deleted my whole site though.
1:09:10 PM [Macro error: The file "" wasn't found.]

JavaScript and Accessibility. Relying solely on JavaScript to access your site is an accessibility barrier. We look at an example, and ways to gracefully degrade. By Andy King. 0222 [WebReference News]

Andy makes a great point here about using JavaScript to enhance the browser experience, but not as a required navigation tool. I ran into a situation similar to the one he describes a couple of weeks ago. I corrupted my NTFS and was forced to reinstall Windows NT - from an old SP2 CD I had. That knocked my IE6 install all the way back to IE2. I figured "No problem", I could just go download the newer browser. I was real surprised when I found that JavaScript was required to access the link to perform the download. I found a way around it (by entering the full download URL myself), but it was frustrating for a bit.
12:14:03 PM [Macro error: The file "" wasn't found.]